One of them was a teenaged girl lugging a big suitcase. Her cheeks were painted in glitter. She looked tired. She ordered a water, then got a book out of a suitcase that looked to be crammed with rave clothing, smelled the book, and began reading.  On occasion, as she was reading, she would laugh out loud.

I figured I had the story.  Practically a cliche.  Underage girl, probably a runaway, goes to Hollywood rave, crashes with people she meets there, and when everyone is no longer amused, they kick her onto the street.  Now she was headed back to San Bernardino or Topeka, or wherever.

To confirm all this, I initiated a conversation with her.  It turned out that her name is Amber.  She works with a group in the Bay Area called Magic Princess that does party performances.  A couple of days earlier, they had gotten a phone call from the Make-a-Wish Foundation in L.A., and Amber happened to be in the office when the call came.  An eight year old girl from Los Angeles with a terminal illness had made a wish to see a fairy.  Amber volunteered to play the fairy.  She rode a bus for 12 hours from Oakland to L.A., spent the afternoon being the little girl’s fairy and was waiting for the bus, to ride 12 hours back home.

The light of Amber’s beautiful story exposed the wrongness of my pathetic preconception. How often do we do this? We perceive things to be a certain way because we see them from the perspective of our own experiences, when in reality, our own experiences are a very narrow lens, like trying to see the world through a pinhole camera. When we manage to put down that lens and really look around, we discover that every interaction holds the potential for something new and wonderful.

It is only when we let go of our own narratives, our scripts for what we think we want our lives to be, our prejudices preconceptions and fears, that we can truly experience the beauty of what life actually is. We don’t have to make the magic. It’s all around us. And if we’re open to it, it will happen.

IndieGoGo, based in Berkeley, CA, and launched in January, 2008, is an online business that matches film projects with contributors who can put up any amount of money they choose for stories and filmmakers they believe in. It was co-founded by Danae Ringelmann, Slava Rubin and Eric Schell, who are seeking to, in their words “democratize film creation.”

The business model has two components. There are targeted ads on the site placed via Google AdSense and a 9% processing charge, which includes the PayPal fee, when the filmmaker receives the funding from the community.

Participation in an IndieGoGo project is highly improvisational, with a) rules that are easily understood; b) precise definition of roles; c) clear objectives; and d) a game that’s win-win.

Easy Rules: IndieGoGo describes itself as “an online social marketplace connecting filmmakers and fans to make independent film happen. The platform provides filmmakers the tools for project funding, recruiting, and promotion, while enabling the audience to discover and connect directly with filmmakers and the causes they support.” From this forthright initiation, the rules of the game–from communications protocols to the mechanics and safeguards of making contributions–get explained in equally plain language. This is a welcome contrast to the rules of the Hollywood game which are quite mysterious, often get-rewritten mid- or even post-game, and involve a lot of winking, sleight-of-hand, and under-the-table-action.

Clear Roles: Players play the game as either ‘Artists’ or ‘Fans’. Artists’ roles call for them to ‘Post, Promote and Produce.’ Fans’ roles call for them to ‘Discover, Support and Get VIP Perks.’

Objectives: Get the film made! Nothing else matters. If the film gets made, a new set of objectives can kick in. The objective of the IndieGoGo game, however, is to ‘get product in the can.’

Win-Win: Contributors to IndieGoGo films are not in it to make money, the paybacks are not financial, and that’s about as honest a statement as an indie filmmaker can make to a backer. Indie films have always been a labor of love. The ten ‘doctors and dentists’ who financed the Coen Bros.’ first film, Blood Simple, got the satisfaction of launching the careers of a couple of great filmmakers. Chances are they have not shared in the Bros.’ subsequent boxoffice booty and you did not see them onstage when the boys collected their Oscars. The win-win offered by IndieGoGo involves participation and accountability. By programming transparency into its game, IndieGoGo, enables ‘Artists’ to reward ‘Fans’ with ‘VIP Perks’ that can include things like creative input during production, invitations to screenings, and characters named after them. To be sure, there are far more films on IndieGoGo that get no traction (e.g. “Money Raised: $0 of $2,168,000″) than those who list ‘Successes,’ but that has always been the bootstrapping nature of the marketplace for art. Remember that Van Gogh sometimes had to trade paintings for meals.

Two filmmakers whose project has found wings thanks to the angels of IndieGoGo are director Michealene Risley and producer Anand Chandrasekaran.

In 2006, Risley began shooting a documentary about a horrible myth promoted by tribal healers in Zimbabwe that men with AIDS can cure themselves by raping a virgin, and a woman named Betty Makoni who fights the myth and tends to its young (sometimes as young as one year old!) female victims. After shooting 22 hours of footage in Zimbabwe, Risley and her crew were arrested, jailed, their film seized by Zimbabwean police. Risley and crew made it out of the country with the 22 hours, and at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival she met Chandrasekaran, a tech entrepreneur from Silicon Valley, looking for a film project to support.

The two filmmakers formed a partnership. They soon began promoting Risley’s film, Tapestries of Hope, on IndieGoGo, where they have raised two rounds of contributions totaling over $50,000.

Tapestries of Hope has become one of IndieGoGo’s biggest success stories. A community of supporters centered in Northern California and extending around the world, has joined its game and, with the film’s completion now assured, the objectives have begun to evolve toward the goals of putting an end to the horrible myth and healing its victims. Tapestries, Chandrasekaran told me this week, has been invited to stage its world premiere later this year at the United Nations.

In the expanded awareness made possible by the Networked World, we experience burdens we have not had to bear before. But our power to connect — patron to artist, money to cause, healing to suffering, vision to reality — has expanded too. The payback to backers of Tapestries of Hope cannot be tallied in the boxoffice grosses. There’s no EBITDA on heroism. The payback comes with shining a light on an ugly and inhuman atrocity, and supporting the cause of Betty Makoni, a beautiful human being whose bravery and sense of purpose is the measure of us all.

SUGGESTIONS FROM THE AUDIENCE

In business, a ‘Suggestion From the Audience’ consists of data from the marketplace. The big suggestion in this scene is clear: the audience is migrating from a couple of entertainment formats to many — or to one ubiquitous web-enabled metaverse, depending on how you look at it. Either way, it ain’t just about your TV and your motion pictures any more. Money is being made elsewhere, lots of it, and both sides are angling for their slice of the new pie.

WGA: Acknowledges the suggestion and acts on it. Grade: A

AMPTP: Ditto. There’s no mistaking what the market data says and where the ad dollars are going. Grade: A

THEMES

Themes are ideas that guide and inform a business performance. Suggestions From the Audience provide the inspiration for these Themes.

WGA: It has adopted the familiar labor Theme of ‘Screwed by the Suits’ (and secondary themes of ‘Now or Never’ and ‘Fair Share’). While the ‘Screwed’ theme may appeal to some in the TV and film audience, it is not the segment of the audience migrating to phones and the web for entertainment (who have themselves embraced a theme called ‘Screw the Suits’ — and don’t the Suits know it!). The theme adopted by the WGA does not follow organically from the Suggestion. Grade: C

AMPTP: It’s always a little tougher to read a Management performance, but they seem have adopted Themes like ‘Whole New Ballgame’ and ‘Holding the Fort’. Their desire is to hedge against audience and ad dollar erosion by generating revenues in new media. There is also an undercurrent of ‘Fear of the Unknown’ running through their actions. While not exactly eliciting empathy, these themes do a slightly better job of acting on the Suggestion than the WGA is doing. Grade: B-minus

INITIATION

An Initiation is the first significant or meaningful action made in a scene.

WGA: It initiated by encouraging media coverage of its deliberations in the 72 hours leading up to the strike, augmented by a flurry of blogs and posts online by its members, and stars joining the picket lines. But these are not Blacksburg coal miners striking over poor working conditions. The unfocused quality of this initiation is epitomized by a Saturday Night Live sketch last weekend in which a studio executive “making only $20 million a year” bashed the writers “making $200,000 a year.” Does anyone in the audience relate to either of those numbers? The grade improves because the internet and the blogosphere give Writers a forum for doing what they do best, and stars by definition have strong audience appeal. Grade: B-minus

AMPTP: It initiated by lamenting in the media that we will soon be without our favorite TV shows. This, too, is a move that fails to connect with the most significant segment of the audience. The migratory media consumer will simply move on to new favorites, and there are unlimited options. Maybe some people will miss Letterman and Leno, but, again, these will not be the new media users whose loyalty both players are courting. Grade: B-minus

GAME

The Game is the engine that drives the scene. For it to be played, it must be agreed upon by all the players in the scene. One of the most significant talents a GameChanger has is the ability to choose and play productive games that make the objective possible.

WGA: The game is ‘Strike’. This game involves putting so much pressure — financially and in terms of public sentiment — on management that management capitulates. (Note that the AMPTP has agreed to the game.) The problem with the WGA playing this game is that financially, the AMPTP can play the game longer and to its advantage — by using up inventory, and lowering costs by cutting overhead and letting expensive contracts expire. And as for public sentiment, no one writing for a network sitcom and fighting for future residuals can earn much empathy from a public concerned with outsourcing, education, the environment, the war against whoever we’re fighting these days, and health care. Grade: C

AMPTP: Given the reasons cited above, the Strike game works out better for this player. If the AMPTP is out to break the union, this is a game that could do it, given the glut of reality shows and the (non-union written) content it can cultivate and bring to market for the duration of the strike. Generally, however, a successful player in the Networked World engages in games that are win-win, not a win-lose game like this one, an artifact from the Industrial Age. Grade: B-minus

COMMUNICATION

Players in a business scene need to communicate well for it to achieve its objective. (In this scene the objective for both sides to have what they deem is their fair slice of the new media pie.) Human communication happens on three levels: Cosmetic: the dialogue exchanged; what’s on the surface); Emotional (our innermost desires, what drives us) and Meta (the symbols and metaphors we use to express ourselves and connect with the audience).

WGA: The cosmetic level is as eloquent as it gets, but the emotional and meta communication leave a lot to be desired. Who gets stirred to action by a tale of woe told by the well-heeled and well-fed? The lack of emotional communication leaves the audience’s sense of justice and indignation unaroused. Grade: B-minus

AMPTP: Relatively silent cosmetically, and studiously unemotional, it owns the meta communication with brands and characters the audience knows well. When it comes down to Mickey Mouse vs. Jon Robin Baitz, guess who wins the hearts and minds of the audience? Grade: B

OVERALL

Yesterday, I was on East Melrose Avenue when a motorcycle cop stopped traffic for no more than three minutes to let a picture car for an Ikea commercial drive through a red light. Drivers of the held-up cars laid on their horns and did not stop. 20 or more cars were honking the entire time. And this was not friendly honking. This was angry, impatient, who-do-they-think-they-are? honking. This was the audience talking back to Hollywood, right in its own backyard. Both players in this scene need to do a better job of improvising, or the game they’re playing will turn into a lose-lose proposition.

WGA: GPA 2.7

AMPTP: GPA 3.05

With grades like these, ain’t nobody going to no Harvard. In an era when anybody can own their own bakery, waging a very public fight over slices of a pie does not seem like such a productive scene for either player.